The next board game from Stonemaier Games is called Apiary, and it’s about sentient spacefaring bees. The high-concept title was formally announced in a company newsletter on Wednesday following an unplanned leak online. While you may be tempted to poop the concept a bit, underestimate founder Jamey Stegmaier at your peril. The wacky themes he takes under his wing are regularly known for their industry-defining impact.
St. Louis-based Stonemaier has built its business on a string of offbeat hits, starting with 2016’s hits Scythe, which Stegmaier himself designed. The asymmetrical strategy game is set in an alternate history version of 1920s Europe created by an extraordinary Polish artist named Jakub Różalski. It contains idyllic scenes of rural life, complemented by thirty-meter-tall, diesel-powered robots. Różalski’s work has since been turned into a real-time strategy video game, a Neil Blomkamp short film, and a handful of successful expansions Unpleasant Scythe yourself. Its success helped revitalize a hardcore corner of the larger hobby gaming space and reinvigorate old titles such as Twilight Empire and seeding the market for new games like Oath: Crowns of Empire and Exile.
But while Scythe Particularly drawing attention among diehard hobbyists, Stonemaier’s next hit game, wingspan, has become a mainstream hit. The ornithology-based game, designed by Elizabeth Hargrave, won the 2019 Kennerspiel des Jahres, one of the most prestigious board game awards. wingspan and Hargrave have since been profiled by both The New York Times, The New Yorkers, National Public Radio – even the National Audubon Association. Stonemaier has publicly said it has sold over a million copies – an astounding number for an independently produced board game.
So in light of its other successes, Stonemaier’s game about giant, thinking bees colonizing other planets in our galaxy doesn’t seem all that strange. Created by budding designer Connie Vogelmann with art by Kwanchai Moriya, the game has been in development for over two years with the help of Stonemaier. The final product allows 1-5 players to explore the stars for 60-90 minutes of gameplay. It’s a far cry from the more hour-long epic that a good game is Scythewhile the gameplay looks a bit crunchier than wingspan.
Here’s the official description of the announcement:
In a distant future, humans no longer inhabit the Earth. The cause of their disappearance (or perhaps their demise) is unknown, but their absence left a void ready to be filled by another sentient species. Over countless generations, one species of the humble honeybee has evolved to fill that void. They grew in size and intelligence and became a very advanced society.
In Apiary (…) eEach player controls 1 of 20 unique factions. Your faction starts the game with a beehive, some resources and worker bees. A worker placement and hive building challenge awaits you: explore planets, gather resources, develop technologies, and create carvings to demonstrate your faction’s strengths (measured in victory points) for one year of Flow. However, the scarcity is fast approaching and your employees can only take a few actions before they have to go into hibernation!
Remarkable is the fact that Apiary will bring together two extremely popular mechanisms common in modern board games. The first, worker placement, requires players to use a limited number of pawns to complete multiple tasks, the performance of which can bring them into direct conflict with other players. The second, building engines, requires players to use a carefully curated collection of cards or tokens in the hope of creating the most efficient system for accumulating victory points by the end of the game. Apiary also features the same kind of random start found in Scythewith players choosing from a collection of random bee factions and randomly starting hives to create unique conditions during each playthrough.
Early copies of Apiary will be available from October 4 at the Essen Game Fair in Germany, with online orders starting around the same time and shipping to North American addresses in October. European orders will be executed some time later. The rules and an FAQ document are available for download. Additional information can be found on Youtubewhere Stegmaier answered fan questions on Wednesday.